Amrit Kumar & Xinshu Dong: Zilliqa – A Scalable Sharded Public Blockchain

Scaling public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is a long standing technical challenge. In this episode, we cover Zilliqa which has pioneered a design to scale public blockchain throughput with the number of nodes by sharding the blockchain. Sharding has been hitherto proposed as a scaling technique by Ethereum. Zilliqa is one of the first projects to propose a concrete design with an operational testnet processing a couple thousand transactions per second across several shards.

Our guests, Xinshu Dong (CEO) and Amrit Kumar (Crypto Lead), walk us through the objectives, protocol design and fundraising structure of this innovative project. We also briefly cover Zilliqa’s novel approach to designing a smart contract language and execution environment.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Sharding as a scaling technique
• Different kinds of sharding, including state sharding and non-state sharding
• How Zilliqa works under the hood – consensus algorithms & transaction processing
• Zilliqa’s novel approach for a smart contract language
• Details of a new cryptocurrency, Zillings

Episode links:

• Zilliqa Website
• Zilliqa Blog
• Zilliqa Whitepaper
• Prateek Saxena and his research group at NUS Singapore

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/209